the GoodEater Collaborative

Author: Joshua Levin (34 Articles)

Joshua Levin is a consultant to non-profits and their corporate partners in sustainable agriculture business development and sustainable food markets. Joshua holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business, where he was a Catherine B. Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship, and a BA from Harvard University. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn, NY.

Haiti’s post-quake humanitarian disaster is directly tied to its food supply and the collapse of the rural economy.  But will the long-term recovery model in Haiti simply repeat the mistakes of the past?  Combating the dominant paradigm is an accelerating grassroots movement  – from farmers burning Monsanto seeds to edible schoolyards — seeking to create a new future for the nation; one that will restore both the food supply and the environment.

I’m currently working with a team to produce Hands That Feed .  The documentary film will explore the agricultural collapse in Haiti, its role in the post-earthquake food crisis, and the emerging grassroots development models that seek to restore Haiti’s rural economy and environment.  We stand at a critical juncture for Haiti, as well as at an unparalleled “teachable moment” for the world.  Through this work, I have continued to uncover an incredible, unfolding story of people working at the grassroots level to create a new, sustainable agriculture-based development paradigm.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the world watched news footage that conveyed looting and wrestling for morsels of food in Haiti.  The result was an unprecedented upwelling of international compassion and support.  Yet the underlying social and political causes of the crisis are not widely covered or known, and it is easy at first glance to simply blame natural events.

But there’s of course a larger story.  The development paradigm enacted in Haiti over the last 30 years – while converting the small country into America’s 4th largest rice export market – flooded Haiti with cheap, subsidized food imports that rapidly changed the face of the largely rural, agriculture-based country.  As economic opportunity dwindled in the countryside, the population of Port-au-Prince has more than doubled since 1989.   The resulting build-up of urban slums, flimsy structures, crime, deforestation for charcoal fuel, and lack of local food supply chains, created the perfect storm when met with natural disaster.  I wrote in detail on this process, based on my work in Haiti after the earthquake, in Why Did the Haitian Earthquake Become a Food Crisis?

Then, there was the humanitarian aid mission.  Groups such as the World Food Program, the Red Cross, UNICEF, the US Military, the Israeli Defense Forces, and many others thankfully did their best to rapidly distribute much-needed food and medical supplies.  Yet the permaculture and sustainable agriculture practitioners had much to teach.  Why should the Red Cross add 20,000 plastic water bottles to Haiti’s waste stream when Port-au-Prince has a fantastic aquifer?  Admitting that refugees will likely remain in the camps a long time, why not build common areas within the compounds where people can graze their animals rather than simply depend on handouts?  Why not compost waste into soil.  And why import so much plastic and wood for shelters when their are endless stands of bamboo?

This amazing NPR video segment from two days ago captures the current status of the food supply: The Problem with Giving Free Food to Hungry People.

GiveLove.org Alternative Shelter Design

The organization Permaculture Relief has attacked a number of these issues and maintains a list of active organizations in Haiti.  GiveLove has been building sustainable refugee shelters using locally available materials.  SOIL , recently covered by Kristoff, is building and distributing inexpensive compost toilets.  Much of this work builds uponthe success of Cegrane Permaculture Refugee Camp, which housed up to 43,000 refugees in Macedonia in 1999 while maintaining regenerative systems and food supply.

Finally, there is the long-term recovery.  Haiti’s population is still 75% farmers, they have amazing year-round growing conditions, and the urban population desperately needs food.  Investing in agriculture should be a slam dunk, right?  Wrong.  The State Department and USAID are pushing the same old dogma which turned Haiti into the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (and America’s 4th largest rice export market): Invest only in the cities; subsidize the textile industry; and let the countryside collapse, providing a flood of cheap labor for urban industry (and an epic buildup of slums).

All this despite former President Bill Clinton’s groundbreaking admission of failure and need for new policies:

“It was a mistake. I have to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10, 2010. “The country has the best chance in my lifetime to achieve this objective: to build a modern self-sustaining state. But what it means is that we have to think about our roles in a different way, and how we will play them in this reconstruction process.”

But this time, there is a counter-movement, and that’s exactly what we seek to capture.  Andrew Jones, founder of Cegrane (see above), is responsible for developing the permaculture program within Nouvelle Vie Youth Corps, one of the primary subjects of Hands That Feed.  Nouvelle Vie is training, and paying, 30 vibrant young Haitian leaders to go out and teach a thousand Haitians sustainable agriculture skills, build intensive agriculture plots in schoolyards and refugee camps, and teach yoga-based post-trauma breathing techniques.  From this thousand, Nouvelle Vie will recruit a new batch of 100 Youth Corps members, who will then teach 10,000.  And so on, and so forth.  All the while developing Haitian self-reliance both in food supply and leadership.

Is this just “Eco-Imperialism” (a term I recently learned from a conservative blog)?  Not if you ask the Haitian government officials who are begging international donors to stop sending food.  Nor if you ask Jean Ked Neptune, a director at the Ministry of Environment, who is developing programs to employ women as worm composters in refugee camps, despite his department’s virtually absent budget.  And finally, not if you ask the homegrown MPP Peasant Movement.  With membership of 50,000, and a rising star named Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the group recently led a demonstration of 10,000 peasants who burned early shipments of Monsanto’s “gift” of 475 tons of seeds.  These seeds contain the carcinogenic pesticides Maxim XO and Thiram, which the EPA bars for home gardening in the U.S., and requires commercial farmers to use protective gear.  How many Haitians do you think own plastic goggles, gloves, and protective jumpsuits?  Furthermore, these seeds are hybrids, which means that the traits are not passed on to the next generation through the traditional practice of seed-saving.  You need to purchase the seeds next year from Monsanto, as well as all of the special irrigation, fertilizer, and other expensive inputs required to cultivate these species – which means going into debt.  (But if your neighbors do it, you have to do it to compete – leverage-up or get out.)  These seeds are being distributed through USAID with your tax check.

This harkens back to when the U.S. Pork lobby asked the State Department in the late-1970’s to pressure the Haitian government to order the slaughter of the creole pig, the ubiquitous and locally-adapted Haitian icon which provided both a source of meat and “savings”.  Now Haitians import their meat.

Courtesy Noramise.org

Let’s not have a repeat performance.  Haiti is full of locally-adapted species, agricultural labor, rich land, and hungry people.  Agro-ecological methods are now very highly developed, producing huge yields while restoring eroded soils.  The problem is, they are labor and knowledge-intensive, not capital and chemical intensive, so they don’t make anyone any money.  Even a moderate investment in restoring Haitian agriculture through sustainable methods and domestic skills could easily feed the nation, while making Haiti independent from aid and more protected against future natural disaster.  Let Haiti learn from the past, and the world learn from Haiti.

To help us highlight these groups and this movement, we really need support.  Please check out Hands That Feed, make even a small donation, and forward the link to anyone interested in Haiti, international development, and/or sustainable agriculture.